Interview Text:

What is the inspiration behind the Root Abyss?

The story of the World Tree was completed a long time ago, but we never had an opportunity to reveal it. Root Abyss is that opportunity!

The team members stretched their imaginations and thought about how the World Tree would have spent its time after the Black Mage forced it to seek refuge deep beneath Sleepywood. Root Abyss is a place of darkness and energy, so we took inspiration from movies and games set in dark and gloomy worlds. Lewis Carroll would be right at home in this world...

Creating the look and feel of a place like Root Abyss was challenging, but we’re very happy with the way it turned out.

How did Root Abyss change during development?

Early in development, Root Abyss’s bosses were all going to be gigantic like Vellum, but after internal testing, we realized that while the giant bosses looked cool, they were all very similar and weren’t as fun as smaller, more agile bosses. In the first iteration, one of the bosses was even larger than Vellum!

Needless to say, we rethought our boss encounters and created Von Bon, Pierre, the Crimson Queen, and Vellum, all with unique strategies and personalities.

How do Root Abyss’s bosses differ from the other bosses in the game?

Root Abyss’s bosses require a party with tight collaboration and a plan of action! The bosses are difficult to beat alone, but shouldn’t be a problem for parties that work together. In Pierre’s fight, you can only attack him when he transforms into a certain color. If you’re wearing the blue hat and he’s blue, you can’t hurt him, so you need a teammate with the red hat to keep on dishing out damage. Teamwork is essential, and death count and reward distribution have been changed to reflect this.

All the bosses have their own unique patterns, and if you take the time to learn these patterns, you don’t have to be max level or decked out with perfect equipment to take them down.

How was it decided that GMS will get the Root Abyss?

Root Abyss content was intended to be introduced to the oversea services from the early planning phase.

After considering many things, we decided to introduce it to GMS after the last Tempest update, Angelic Buster.

We wanted to create a nice surprise by releasing the giant boss contents at unexpected time like this. We believe it will be first released at GMS. We hope many players will enjoy this.

GMS is getting Root Abyss before KMS. Isn’t it usually the other way around?

GMS players have just created their Luminous, Kaiser, and Angelic Buster characters, and now we’re giving them some powerful bosses to fight!

What do you think players will like most about Root Abyss?

The rewards, of course! Players can collect Yggdrasil Runes to purchase the Sealed Box, which contains many surprising items. The bosses also drop unique Hats and Chairs that can be worn as badges of honor for conquering Root Abyss. On top of all that, there are also daily quests designed for players who want rewards but don’t have much time to invest.

As for the bosses, we expect the Crimson Queen to be quite popular... We look forward to seeing the reaction when players meet her for the first time!

What are your thoughts on the new area?

Are you excited about bosses that will up the difficulty from the usual hack-n-slash fest?

Do you think that this will deter people from bossing once the initial novelty wears down?

Yeah, it's kind of a non-answer, but what can you do? Hopefully this becomes something they do at least a little more often. New content is always nice! That said, too much new stuff can lead to the old stuff becoming obsolete or neglected faster than if people had a little time to get used to it, so hopefully if this is a new thing it's not often enough to give us burnout.

I definitely agree on the whole obsolete issue. It's also contributed from the fact that they nerf the crap out of everything. For example, Evolving World is really OP for leveling, it's practically your own personal LHC. Then KMS nerfed the crap out of it, and now it's empty.

Or something like: "KMS always gets to test and polish the new updates before giving them to other MSs, so we are taking that responsability this time. Expect a lot of downtime and unscheduled maintenances."

Actually I read another interview on Massively and the reason was stated that we got all 3 new classes so close and quick together (unlike KMS with all the nerfs and balancing and what not) that they could release it for GMS first as the turnover time was much shorter.